Ohio bill targets ‘nurse burnout’

Mariska Roussell remembers reaching her breaking point after working 10 consecutive 12-hour shifts as a nurse.

She cried in her car after finishing the 10th straight at Byrd Regional Hospital in Leesville, a Louisiana city of more than 5,000 people.

"I definitely, definitely had a ton of stress from it," she said.

It wasn't until Rousesell, 32, started working at the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center that she realized she had experienced burnout at her former hospital.

"I didn't know what burnout was until I got to OSU," said Roussell, now of Reynoldsburg.

More than half of all clinicians in the medical field in the United States deal with symptoms of burnout, according to an article in the American Journal of Managed Care. The article was written by Bernadette Melnyk, the dean of the College of Nursing at Ohio State University.

"Clinicians take great care of other people, but they often don't prioritize their own self-care," she said.

Burnout has three components: exhaustion, negativity and reduced professional efficacy, according to the World Health Organization.

Nurses have a problem with burnout. More than half of nurses reported suboptimal physical and mental health, according to a 2018 study published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

"If the self isn't strong, we're not going to do a good job taking care of patients," said Mary Walters, a nurse at OhioHealth Grant Medical Center.

Some of the symptoms of nurse burnout include irritability, frequent call-offs, cynicism, self-doubt and exhaustion.

The causes of burnout are numerous. Nurses typically work 8- to 12-hour shifts, but working overtime easily tacks on extra hours. Nurses also have less patient interaction because they are pulled away from the patient's bedside to deal with electronic medical records.

"Because of the demands of technology and other things that have surfaced, people are spending less time with patients and that's a factor that contributing to burnout and loss of joy in what they're doing," Melnyk said.

House Bill 144 would make Ohio the 19th state to end mandatory nurse overtime, joining states such as California, New York, Texas and West Virginia. Mandatory overtime is when nurses are forced to work more hours than their agreed contracts, which typically means exceeding 40 hours of work per week.

Nurse burnout can lead to turnover, which can be expensive. It costs a hospital about $60,000 to $70,000 to replace a nurse, depending on the specialty, Walters said.

When a nurse or a clinician realizes they are experiencing burnout, the most important thing to do is to take action immediately, said Kelly Trautner, the interim CEO of the Ohio Nurses Association.

Hospital systems have programs in place to help clinicians and nurses cope with the demands of their jobs, and many hospitals have Employee Assistance Programs for individual counseling or group sessions for employees.

OhioHealth Kobacker House brought in four Australian Cattle dog puppies, a hound dog and two cats from the Gahanna Animal Medical Center for the staff on Thursday afternoon.

"This is a huge morale boost and nice break from what we do day-in and day-out," said Amanda Dobosh, clinical nurse manager for OhioHealth Hospice. "The smiles that I'm seeing I haven't seen in a long time for a lot of the staff."

As a hospice center, the Kobacker staff sees death on a daily basis -- putting an emotional and psychological strain on the nurses.

"We're often walking patients in and walking out with the funeral home," Dobosh said. "That is emotionally heavy and psychologically heavy. It's just exhausting. To have any kind of reprieve from that, even for a minute, is important."

Nurses, often called a doctor's eyes and ears, need to find a way to cope with the stress from their jobs.

For Fallon Haug, that means calling her husband on her way home after every shift at Grant Medical Center's Trauma Intermediate Unit.

"I just vent and then I get home and I let it go," she said. "I can't carry that with me."

She works three 12-hour shifts a week and has worked in the Trauma Intermediate Unit for three years.

"It's a hard unit to be on," she said. "Our patients can be very challenging. Their families can be very challenging. They're dealing with a lot of emotional stress (and) physical stress."

Nurse burnout might not be a tangible thing, but the well-being of nurses is vital to the hospital system.

"It seems like an investment in something that's not directly related to the work, but at the end of the day when medical errors are reduced, when turnover is reduced, when we reduce the number of people who leave the clinical side of work, the health care system becomes stronger, there's more continuity, patient outcomes are better," making it a good investment, Trautner said.

As for Roussell, she currently works as a postpartum nurse at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. She gets massages and works out when she is stressed, and goes for a walk to unwind after a bad day.

"Definitely take your off-days," she said. "You do need that self-care day. Sometimes you need a day just to unwind and just lie around your house and watch Netflix. It's fine."

___

(c)2019 The Repository, Canton, Ohio

Visit The Repository, Canton, Ohio at www.cantonrep.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.